Studying the Poetics of Violence: A Critical Take on the Selected Works of Dalit and Tribal Women Poets

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye helped me to understand what it meant to be born black, poor woman in the USA. Her work gave me an ideal platform to explore what it means to be born a poor Dalit woman in contemporary India. In order to understand the layered connotation of the lives of Dalit women, I deliberated upon the selected poetry by Dalit and tribal women poets and came to the conclusion that apparent similarity between the two contexts comes under scanner and ends abruptly with the following comment by Bell Hook in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. She writes, ‘when the child of two black parents is coming out of the womb the factor that is considered first is skin colour, then gender, because race and gender will determine that child’s fate’. On the contrary, a child of two parents from a lower caste will remain a low caste because caste is infallible and independent of the truce of fate-determining the skin colour that may redefine the gender experience. As a Telugu Dalit poet, Chillappa Swaroopa Rani laments, ‘Stamped with a low caste, I was born/that day it-self branded slut.’ Thus, the thrust of this article is not to bring forth the comparative study between the two contexts but to crystallize the issues of Dalit women as enunciated in their poetry and to engage with the nuances of gender and caste that punctuate their day-to-day lives. This article encompasses the post-colonial feminism theoretical framework that resists the universalization of feminist issues seen and perceived only from the ‘Euro-American feminists’ point of view and ignores the differences in race, ethnicity, regional diversity, etc., through which a woman experiences her gender biases. The selected Dalit poets are Rajni Tilak, Poonam Tushamed, Rajni Anuragi, Sushila Takbhure, Kunti and Nirmal Putul. The main issues expressed in a tribal poet’s works remain Jal-Jungle-Zameen, human trafficking, a lack of legal documentation, witch hunting, etc., while Dalit poets stress on police atrocities, a lack of basic amenities, a lack of quality schools for their children, a lack of access to health care, the domineering influence of patriarchy that punctures their private and public domain, etc.